Patrick White

Bituminous Briquettes Of Coal For Eyes - Poem by Patrick White

Bituminous briquettes of coal for eyes, and the shadows of diamonds in your heartthe crows delivered like loveletters in the dark.Spooky and eerie, the Aquarian wyrd of someone with the emotional life of a Tarot pack who picked up overlooked skulls from the forest floor like lost moonsonly the undertakers of the rain and the anthracite ants you blew gentlyout their eye-sockets like lunar landing craftwept over as you placed them in the museums of your windowsills, artifacts from the firepits of Stonehenge at an equinoctial eclipse.

The longer I loved you, the younger you grew. I knew you were coming back from the dead.That love had dislodged you at the side of your hospital bed like a snowdrift sliding off the roof. Death or a hysterectomy in your early twenties. They tore the bell out of your steeple, the nest out of your bird, the promise of dawn out of your La Brea Tarpitand there wasn’t a lot to sing about after thatbut you kept the slash of a smile on your face like the scalpel of light edged by the new moon.

Blind isn’t a colour, but black suited you best.A lover isn’t a knife at an occult sacrifice, but you’d had several that wheeled youlike a butterfly crucified in a circus where every blade that tried to cut your heart out after your womb, was the addition of another petal.

Xion flinched, but you had the courage of a black dwarf that took everything in they threw at you like a shelter for the homeless.You healed the shadows of small, broken things. You took the fallen in like birds of prey and you mended their wings. And for awhile they felt like constellations after you left. In that vast expanse of night that unrolled like a starmap of your soul, you restored them to an exalted place of shining in your darkness.

Noble, a few more stars and you could have passed for a queen of Egypt rummaging for your body parts in the canopic jars of other people’s hearts, your beauty, an ancient creation myth restored after long severance as if the moon in its mourning veils hadn’t come up in years, and then, in full eclipse just appeared one night like a sacred prostitute on the stairs of the Iseum with a fascination for pyramidal men aligned with the circumpolar indestructibles of heaven centred on an afterlife too much like this one to be astronomically credible.

Microcosmically honest, you never fully mastered trusting anyone, though you smiled at their efforts, but not once in nine years did I ever doubt you when my back was turned like a sundialthough there was always something slightly suspectabout the heroism of your compassion for the deadas you leapt like a genie in an oil lamp into the calderas of their spent volcanoes on the moon, to trade their new mirages in for something completely old.

I saw you grow like a religion of dependents who never wanted to get over themselves for fear of losing someone like you to worship like initiates into the coven of a great witch as many told me you were as if, being a male. they knew more about you than I did, and who knows, in retrospect, maybe they did, maybe they did.

Hear that northern river of raven hair is long and white now, that you’re still beautiful, that the guys in motorized wheelchairs line up at the entrance of the mall to compete for who gets to drive you across the overly waxed floorsas you jump laughing into their laps on your way to work in the morning, and you keep the hotshot owners of the chic clothing stores leaning in their doorways wondering whyyou choose them over them. Had to smile when I heard that. The spirit of love lives in you yet.You still know how to raise the dead.

Prayer wheels, hot wheels, wheels on meals, training wheels, wheels and deals, cogwheels, wheels of birth and death. Where the rubber hits the road, I could have told them how it feels to stand there like a crop circle in a labyrinth of rain that goes round and round, spinning its wheels like a red-tailed hawk sliding down the bannisters of its thermals, remember, when the sunsets painted their eyelids over the alder groves? You want a beautiful witch to ride shotgun with you, brother, you better learn to shift that four on the floor as if you were riding that golden chariot of yours through a slum and everyone were hitchhiking, and you stopped to pick them all up to remind you that you’re mortal. Your driveshaft better be yoked to six white moonsand every spoke of the tree rings in your heartwood better be a broom that knows how to do cartwheels in the dark.